Manon cries some more. It is the way Bryony listens, as if she has an arm around her, that makes Manon’s barriers dissolve.
‘Was he awful, then?’ asks Bryony. ‘As bad as the last one?’
‘No, that’s the thing, Bri, he was all right, but that’s the worst feeling, that it was just all right, nothing special. Just nothingy, like I can’t ever rise to the occasion.’
‘Maybe you need to give it more of a go. Nothing’s perfect, you know.’
‘He wanted me to pay more for the meal because I had wine.’
Bryony is silent.
‘He didn’t ask me anything about myself.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s just men, I’d say.’
Manon presses her fingers into her eyes. This is what she doesn’t want Bryony to say. People in couples, they always want you to settle for anything, as if you are a second-class citizen. Just because you’re lonely, you have to make do with the scrap ends.
‘You want me to make do with the scrap ends.’
‘We’re all making do with the scrap ends, Manon,’ says Bryony. ‘This is something you fail to grasp.’
‘The sex was quite good, unexpectedly,’ says Manon.
‘You what?’
‘Well, I thought it’d be rude not to.’
‘Don’t make a joke of it.’
Manon doesn’t reply.
‘You don’t need to do that, y’know,’ says Bryony, her voice full of disappointment.
‘No, I know.’
‘When’s the next one?’
‘Next week. Not sure I can stand it.’
‘Treat it like a job. It’s a game of numbers. Your lucky one will come up eventually. Only don’t shag them. Not all of them, anyway.’
Manon can’t stand to talk about it any more. ‘How are the kids?’ she says. ‘How was your Sunday?’
‘Freezing playground, 8 a.m. Started to sleet but we stayed there anyway. Me and Peter had a row. Lunch at 11 a.m. Bobby threw a cup of milk down me, then shat in his pants. The usual.’
‘Relaxing.’
‘I can’t wait to go to work tomorrow, just to have a sit-down. Canteen lunch? Whaddya say? I’ll buy you a watery soup to cheer you up. Or are you frontline officers too important?’
A familiar prod, beneath which is Bryony’s peevishness over all the excitement she thinks she’s missing out on. She’s an officer at Cambridgeshire too, but mostly desk-bound since the children – filing court papers or on disclosure.
‘My diary is remarkably free at the moment,’ Manon says. ‘Never know what the day’ll throw at me though. So yes, great. In theory. One-ish?’
‘Don’t know if I can hold out that long. I’m on toddler time. And Manon?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’ll be all right, you know. You’ll find him – the right man. I just know you will.’
Manon puts the phone down and shuffles under the duvet. She turns the dial on the radio, hears the reassuring murmuring which blends into the fuzz before sleep, when all her darkest ideas bubble up. ‘Victor Bravo, one-two, VB quite concerned by what we’ve got here. Can I have a supervisor please and can you notify on-call SIO.’
Manon opens her eyes and sits up. She knows what the gaps mean, what Oscar One in the control room is getting at, without being able to state it over the airwaves. Something serious. The balloon’s gone up. Senior Investigating Officer? That’s jumpy. Others will be hearing it too and start heading that way, but George Street is around the corner from her – five minutes if she jogs it. She hears DI Harriet Harper’s voice over the radio, saying she’s on her way.
Manon can get this, it’s hers. She flings back the duvet, listening intently to the radio while she pulls on trousers with one hand, reaching for her phone with the other.
‘Missing female,’ says Harriet on the phone. ‘Signs of a struggle. Meet me there.’
The cold cuts into the short gap between Manon’s scarf and her hat, but the place it hurts most is her toes. Bloody Chelsea boots. She might as well have worn flip-flops, and she’ll likely be out in the cold all night, at best in a stationary car with a phone pressed to her ear. She digs her hands deeper into her pockets and hunches her shoulders up to her ears, hearing the clean squeak of her boots in the fresh powder. The trees hold lines of snow like sleeves on every branch. The snow has made a rather unprepossessing urban street (one of the routes out of town and close to the railway line) prettier than it is. As she turns up the garden path to number 20 – a neat little worker’s cottage, identical to its neighbours – she uses a gloved hand to free her mouth of scarf, but Davy speaks first.
‘High-risk misper; looks like it, anyway,’ he says, stamping in the snow. He claps his hands. The tip of his nose is glowing red.
‘Any sign of forced entry?’ says Manon.
‘Door was open, but not forced. There’s some blood, hallway and kitchen, not that much of it, to be fair, and the coats on the floor,’ says Davy. ‘Where’s your paper suit?’
‘Where’s your scene log?’ she says, looking past him into the house.
‘Shit, you got me,’ he says, smiling, and she is reminded how good it is to be around DC Davy Walker. His simple affable kindliness. If all men were like Davy, there would be no wars.
‘Can I get a suit from your car?’
‘Here you go,’ he says, holding up his keys. ‘I’ll start a log now. Don’t tell Harriet.’
She returns, rustling in white paper, her egg-shaped hood encasing her face, and holds Davy’s arm as she pulls on some blue outer shoes.
‘Very fetching,’ he says.
‘I think so,’ says Manon, at his knees. ‘Who’s in there?’
‘Harriet and the missing girl’s boyfriend. She’s keen to shut the place down. I’d wait out here if I were you.’
Manon straightens. ‘Bollocks, I won’t touch anything. Why’ve we not got a DCI on this?’
Davy shrugs. ‘Christmas rota. Draper’s on an aggravated burglary in Peterborough. Stanton’s in the Maldives. Staffing’s back to the bone.’
She steps into the hallway where the coats have dropped from their hooks like fallen soldiers. They scatter the floor. Some of the hoods retain the pointed imprint of the hook on which they hung. Light anoraks (one navy, one red), a fleece (grey), two thick winter coats of the padded kind, one an olive parka with fur trim, the other navy. Leaning against the wall is a rucksack with the handle of a tennis racket poking out; some trainers line the skirting; a Hessian shopper with the words ‘Huntingdon Estates’ written on it. In front of her, on the laminate floor leading to the kitchen, are a couple of drips of blood – not a copious spattering or pooling of the kind they saw in killings, but the type of blood that might come from an injury such as a cut.
Harriet appears in the kitchen doorway.
‘Manon, can you come through? Watch the floor, there,’ she says as Manon tiptoes towards the threshold. ‘Don’t step in the evidence. Manon, this is Will Carter. Mr Carter, this is Detective Sergeant Bradshaw. Mr Carter has reported his girlfriend Edith Hind missing. He returned home at 9 p.m. this evening to find the front door ajar, the coats in disarray and blood over there.’ She points to a larger spatter on the kitchen floor, and some on the cupboard door just above it.
‘Miss Hind’s phone, keys, shoes, and coat were all in the house,’ Harriet says.
Will Carter is pacing, running a hand through his hair. He is preposterously handsome, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a cable-knit jumper, as if he has just stepped out of a razor advertisement. Manon glances at Harriet, who gives her a look which says: Yes, you can shut your gob now.
‘Is there anyone she might be with – a friend or relative?’ asks Manon.
‘I’ve called everyone I can think of,’ says Carter. ‘I’ve called her parents; they’re in London. They haven’t heard from her. And her friend Helena, she was with Edith last night at a party. She says she dropped Edith back here at around midnight. Hasn’t seen or heard from her today.’
‘When did you last speak to Edith?’ says Harriet.
‘Saturday early evening, just before she went out with Helena.’
‘Did she sound her normal self?’
‘Yes, I mean, it was a very quick call.’
‘And I’m sorry, Mr Carter,’ says Manon, ‘you were where?’
‘I’ve been away for the weekend in Stoke. Visiting my mum.’
‘Is there anywhere she might have gone?’ asks Manon. ‘A favourite place? Might she have just wanted time alone?’
‘I don’t see where she could have gone without her keys or her phone or her car.’
‘Car’s outside,’ explains Harriet.
‘I’ve gone through the contacts on her phone, called people who were at the party on Saturday night, our friends at college. Everyone I could think of. No one’s heard from her. I started to panic. Her parents told me to call the police. I mean, not that I wouldn’t have called, but you never know if you’re overreacting, d’you know what I mean? Can you get officers out there looking for her? It just doesn’t feel right. Something’s not right.’
‘What about her passport?’ asks Manon. ‘Is it here?’
‘I don’t know,’ Carter says. He goes to one of the kitchen drawers. ‘She keeps it in here,’ he says, pulling it out. He turns, holding up a small burgundy book. ‘It’s here. There’s a second home, Deeping – it’s her parents’ place, about half an hour’s drive away, near March. Edith’s got keys, but they’re on her key ring, there.’ He points to a bundle of keys on the kitchen table amid bits of paper with numbers written on them, an open diary, and mobile phones. ‘And anyway, you can’t get there without a car.’
‘Someone else might have driven her, perhaps?’ says Manon.
He shrugs. ‘But who? The phone, her keys – she never leaves that stuff. I mean, who does?’
‘Is there any reason she might have wanted to frighten you? Were you on good terms?’ asks Harriet.
Carter is shaking his head before she has even stopped talking. ‘No, no, she wouldn’t. We were on the best of terms. Everything’s good. Better than good. When will you start searching? It’s freezing outside and she hasn’t got her coat.’
‘How do you know, sir?’ says Harriet. ‘The coats appear to have fallen all over the place.’
‘I checked,’ says Carter. ‘I looked through them. I don’t know if I should have, but I wanted to know if she had it or not.’
‘It doesn’t look like you’ve gone through them. They appear to be as they fell.’
‘It only took a cursory look to see that her coat is there – the green one. The parka with the fur trim.’
‘Might she have taken another one?’
‘She hasn’t, I know she hasn’t, and anyway, why would they be all over the floor like that?’
‘A word, Manon, please,’ says Harriet, gesturing outside the kitchen. They step around the blood drips in the hallway and into the lounge next door, which is under-furnished and struggling to emerge from the miasma of an energy-saving light bulb. They speak in low murmurs.
‘Blimey,’ whispers Manon. ‘He’s …’ She blows out through her cheeks.
‘Very agitated, yes. What do you think? Enough to qualify as a high-risk misper? Davy and I have done a search of the house. We need to scope this country place, Deeping, soon as.’
‘Anything upstairs? Any signs of struggle?’
‘Not that I can make out. I want to shut the place down so we don’t lose anything, get SOCO looking at that blood.’
‘She might have disappeared in the early hours this morning,’ says Manon, looking at her watch.
Harriet nods. ‘That’s twenty hours.’
They are silent. They both know the first seventy-two hours are critical for a high-risk missing person. You find them or you look for a body.
‘If that blood’s hers, which is pretty likely, then she could be out there bleeding in some garden or lay-by. We need dogs and we need a helicopter. I want you to set parameters for the early search. I want you to get as many bodies up here as you can to begin house to house and we’ll need to start scoping for CCTV.’
Manon nods. ‘Can I have Davy?’
‘Yep.’
‘Shame Stanton’s missing out.’
‘That’s what happens when you fuck off to the Maldives.’
Manon sends officers straight to Deeping, but there is no sign of the girl there. The helicopter takes two hours to get to them from the Midlands. It hovers loudly, searching back gardens, alleys, and motorway verges for a woman in her twenties clutching an injury, or a slumped figure. The helicopter’s underside is like a black insect against the navy sky, the beat of its blades rhythmic and relentless. It covers swathes of ground in a way officers on foot or in cars cannot hope to do. If its throbbing drone hasn’t woken the neighbours then the dogs will, panting and snuffling under hedges and straining up paths, the scent of Edith Hind still on their snouts from her nightdress. Or the door knocks, neighbours emerging with bed hair in the brash light of their hallways. It’s clod-footed, this type of early search – urgent and messy. Manon coordinates it all on the phone in Davy’s unmarked car, calling in officers from across the county, hearing them report back from house to house, keeping Harriet up to date back at the station, where she is re-interviewing Will Carter.
At 6 a.m. there is a hiatus when there are no more calls she can make, so Manon returns home for a shower and to change her clothes. She pulls at her eyes in the mirror and sees the undernourishment of the night on her skin but also the adrenalin, which has made her pupils dilate. This is why she entered the police – cases like this. Whoppers, the ones you wait weeks or months for, a whole career, even.
Harriet is the same. She’d been made DI after her work on the Soham murders, the case which shaped Cambridgeshire policing more than any other because it was so high profile and because it came to define the battle lines between police and press. The disappearance of two pretty girls in the shimmering, lazy news lull of August. The press had been on their side for one or two days, driving the appeals for witnesses, and then it grew ferocious, like a dog unmuzzled, with resources that outstripped the Major Incident Team’s. Officers suspected hacking, enraged that they themselves had to wait days for authorisation to trace phones; they found themselves showing up to interview potential witnesses, only to find reporters had been there an hour earlier. Some of the more brazen Sunday tabloids hired private detectives and they were all over it, corrupting with their money, turning over evidence, leaving their mark.
Manon holds in her hand a photograph of Edith Hind, auburn-haired and smiling – a face almost confident, the gorgeous bloom of childhood still radiating from her skin. She is wearing a mortar board and gown, with a scroll in her hand. Graduation day at Cambridge. Just like the photo Manon’s father has on the shelf.
Yes, she thinks. This will be big.
She learned as much as anyone from Soham but remained a DS because if you were smart, you realised things didn’t get better when you climbed the ranks. She wanted to stay on the ground, interviewing suspects, running her team of DCs and civilian investigators, not holed up in an office attending management courses and filling in Main-Lines-of-Enquiry forms. It certainly wasn’t, as Bryony maintained, that she was too busy humping her way around the Internet to focus on the exams.
She’s left Davy at the scene in George Street, letting in SOCO – the Scenes of Crime Officer, as it is currently known, or CSI or FSI. She has never known an organisation to love an acronym as much as the police, nor to change them so often. She longs for the day some sleepy mandarin comes up with the Crime Unit National Taskforce.
She picks up the keys to her car and goes to collect Davy, to take him to Cambridgeshire HQ for the morning briefing.